Cars. Anger. Machine guns. They're the heart of America, and nowhere does that heart beat stronger than in the Annis Savestra, a highly-customizable mean machine now available from GTA Online's Legendary Motorsport that deftly blends high-output with heavy weaponry.
This week's GTA Online update also adds a new Adversary Mode called Slashers in which you will, as Rockstar put it, "bludgeon a malevolent shotgun-wielding clown in the face with a flashlight," and get paid for it, too. Between now and January 8, taking part in that particular type of fun will net you double GTA$ and RP, and double rewards are also still on tap until January 8 in the Occupy mode.
There's also a premium stunt race, Duel (locked to Muscle-class vehicles), with GTA$ for the top three finishers and triple RP for all participants, and a time trial, Up N Atom, with GTA$ and RP for everyone who can beat the par time.
Through January 8, you can also score some sweet deals on sleek machines:
50% off Mobile Operations Center Cabs
30% off the Coil Cyclone (Super)
30% off the Grotti Visione (Super)
25% off the Ocelot Ardent (Weaponized Vehicle)
25% off the FH-1 Hunter (Helicopter - both Buy It Now & Trade Price)
25% off the P-45 Nokota (Plane - both Buy It Now & Trade Price)
25% off the HVY APC (Weaponized Vehicle - both Buy It Now & Trade Price)
Alas, with the good news comes some bad: The cold snap that brought a white Christmas to Los Santos has almost passed, and the snow that's been falling will come to an end today.
Yesterday we did the highs, and today we do the lows. These were the more disappointing moments of 2017, according to our PC Gamer global team. And yes, you'll find some loot crate chatter in here. Let us know your lows of the year in the comments.
Andy Kelly: Andromeda flops
I didn't like Mass Effect Andromeda for a lot of reasons, but the main one is that it utterly fails to make you feel like you're an explorer in some uncharted galaxy. The premise is perfect, voyaging through the stars to find a new home. But the execution is disappointingly inept and unimaginative, with nothing out there that feels truly alien.
Say what you will about Interstellar (I love it), but that film really nails the idea of the planets they visit being so wildly outside of the rules of Earth, making them as terrifying as they are awe-inspiring. The giant waves, clouds of ice, and so on. But the planets in Andromeda had none of that. A desert, a jungle, an ice world. Your classic sci-fi archetypes.
And the angara, the only real native race you encounter, have human-shaped faces and a relatable culture and politics. It cheapens the Mass Effect universe when you can travel to a new galaxy and it's basically the same as the Milky Way. BioWare wasted an opportunity here, and that's why Andromeda was a major letdown for me this year.
Samuel Roberts: Horror show
I thought I'd love Resident Evil 7. The demo suggested they were going for something a bit like PT—an original and shocking horror game. And it is for about an hour, even if it's never close to PT's levels of scares and invention. By the end of the game, though, as I shot a procession of goo monsters, and took down yet another boss by shooting the same weak points over and over again, I felt like Resident Evil was in the same shape as when I started. If anything, the boss fights and set pieces were less interesting than Resident Evil 5, which seems to have gained the reputation of taking the series in the wrong direction. But it's definitely a better, more entertaining game to me.
I think I'm among the few that didn't love it. The Baker family as a series of bosses should've been interesting, but I didn't find any of them that scary, except when you'd find the dad lurking in the corridors of the house after you thought you killed him. Resi definitely looked the part: the colour palette was nice and grimy, the VHS tapes were pretty cool—especially the SAW-style death trap one. But it didn't really reinvent the series for me. If it was in third-person rather than first, I genuinely think it'd be considered an average entry in the series, maybe slightly above the first Revelations game.
It doesn't help that the VR mode was launched exclusively on PlayStation. Hopefully we get to try it in January. It's not that Resident Evil 7 was the worst game I played in 2017—I enjoyed it a load more than Rime or Perception—but I thought it'd be a grand new chapter.
Tyler Wilde: Mass disappointment
I'm not a huge Star Wars fan, but I enjoyed The Last Jedi. I like that it didn't play to the expectations set by The Force Awakens, which I think is the inferior film. So I have a hard time understanding why certain Star Wars superfans absolutely hated The Last Jedi—but I can sympathize. As a big Mass Effect fan, I found very little to like about Mass Effect: Andromeda. Many people I know enjoyed it just fine and probably look at me the same way I look at The Last Jedi discontents. Sorry! Though I waffled over my feelings about it for awhile, when I look back, I really didn't like it.
What begins as a story about, and potentially a critique of, colonialism instead backs the Milky Way's expansion throughout Andromeda—with an early nod to noted rich person Elon Musk, of course—so long as invading aliens can stand in as the true evil. Minor conflict with the indigenous angara is easily resolved by having that common enemy, and outside of the angara, the villainous Kett, and the ancient Remnant robots, no other intelligent aliens are found in Andromeda. Humanity (and its alien pals) thus becomes a savior of the locals, an ahistorical theme which skims over all kinds of ethical points: as the more technologically-powerful party, are the Milky Way settlers refugees or invaders? Why have the colonists chosen to replicate the old militaristic power structures they left behind? Delete the Kett and focus more on inter-alien relations—both between those from the Milky Way and the civilizations they encounter in Andromeda—and I think you'd have a much more interesting game. The Krogan rebellion and distrust from the angara are easily the best aspects of Andromeda, but are set aside to make way for war against Borg-like, done-before, alien monsters.
On top of that, I found the plucky 'Chosen One' protagonist dull, as well as most of the supporting cast (whose reasons for leaving their entire galaxy behind are largely ridiculous), and rehashing the original trilogy's focus on ancient aliens and their super-powered artifacts works against making Andromeda feel like a mysterious new frontier—same shit, different galaxy. And these are just criticisms of the story. I'd take over this whole article if I detailed my issues with the sidequests and combat.
Chris Livingston: Take-Two vs Open IV
While this one does have a happy ending, it was still a deeply unpleasant and easily avoidable mess. Back in May, the creator of OpenIV, a GTA modding tool, received an email from Take-Two Interactive requesting any further work on OpenIV be halted. When modder 'GooD-NTS' asked for more information on the matter, Take-Two's legal department mailed a cease and desist notice to his place of work, accusing him of violating Russian laws. GooD-NTS decided, after some deliberation, to stop updating the mod.
It's worth keeping in mind that, at the point of this C&D, OpenIV had already been around for nearly a decade, available for modders and mod-users to play GTA 4 and 5 with modded content. It was relied upon for dozens if not hundreds of mods as it allowed GTA game files to be edited. Its creators had also taken measures to ensure OpenIV couldn't be used in GTA Online, only in single-player.
After a tumultuous few days, Rockstar began talking directly to the modder and soon OpenIV was back and being updated again. Which is, frankly, what should have happened in the first place. Legal action should be a final step, not an opening move. Modders who spend a decade adding content to a game clearly have passion for it, and mods, as I've said before and will no doubt say again, add value to a game. Even if you don't actively support mods (Rockstar doesn't, hence the need for OpenIV in the first place), don't treat modders like enemies. Bringing the legal department of an enormous corporation to bear on an individual who simply loves to create new content for a game on a volunteer basis is a terrible, terrible look.
Wes Fenlon: Loot boxes make for homogenous game design
I think everyone is pretty tired of talking about, and hearing about, loot boxes, but they really are the biggest topic in gaming in 2017, and I think the industry's low point of the year. There are many reasons to dislike them, even cosmetic boxes like Overwatch's, and there are real concerns about how those systems lure in players with addictive tendencies. There are definitely people spending money on loot boxes who can't afford it—not all whales are millionaire lawyers with piles of cash to burn.
I'm thankful loot boxes don't have that kind of pull for me. But even if I don't spend money on them, they're in the games they play, making those games worse. Here's what I had to say about loot boxes on the PC Gamer Show a few months ago, about how they take some of the excitement and mystery out of games by making them too similar.
They're boring. Hopefully this year's backlash means we see far fewer of them in the new year.
Jarred Walton: Component prices aren't meant to rise over time
This has been a strange year for certain segments of the computer hardware scene. Normally, the trend is for everything to get 'better'—faster, smaller, more efficient—while at the same time becoming more affordable. That state-of-the-art PC you bought in 2014 for $3,000 will be slower than this year's mainstream $1,500 system. But for GPUs, SSDs, and RAM, 2017 decided to go a different direction.
Cryptocurrency mining had a major impact on graphics card prices, peaking with cards like the RX 570 and RX 580 selling for more than twice their official launch price. Even now, nine months later, you can't buy an RX 570 4GB for under $200, and it was supposed to be a $169 card. Nvidia weathered the storm a bit better, though GTX 1070 is still nowhere near its all-time low of $350, and with Bitcoin flirting with the $20,000 mark, Ethereum at $800, and Bitcoin Gold at over $4,000, we're still not done.
DDR4 RAM and SSD prices meanwhile have remained high throughout the year. This is mostly thanks to the increased demand from the smartphone sector, where 64GB NAND is now common on high-end models like the iPhone 8 and Galaxy Note 8, the latter of which packs 6GB RAM. Increased supply is supposed to help reverse the trend in 2018, though you can't help but worry about the prices being kept high next year.
Tim Clark: Destiny 2
The moment I first clapped eyes on Destiny 2 at the reveal event in May, running in 4K at 60+ FPS, could easily have been my high of the year. But as we know, what followed has been something of a shuttle crash. It's not that Destiny 2 is a bad game when viewed in isolation. I completely agreed with Tom's verdict that there was an excellent 60-70 hours of grind to be had, and it's especially fun played with friends, as our awards noted. But Bungie's fundamental blunder—and the more I think about it, the more arrogant it looks—was the idea that the sequel could be tailored almost entirely for the casual audience, and the hardcore players would just suck it up and stick around because, hey, that's what they do. Or perhaps even more cynically, maybe the bean counters felt it didn't matter if nobody sticks around so long as enough of them bought the base game, season pass, and some of the baubles in the microtransaction store.
If the vacuum where the endgame should've been was the only issue, then that would have been bad enough. But Bungie compounded the issue with a string of mistakes, from a hidden XP throttling system, to an exotic weapon released seemingly untested, to a DLC expansion that locked vanilla players on PC out of stuff they paid for just over six weeks ago. It's been a baffling series of self-inflicted wounds, and I can't recall such a big studio having to issue so many apologies, so soon after launch. What's most frustrating is that I still love much about the game and still spend a lot of time—too much!—playing it.
The universe Bungie has built, how the weapons look and feel to fire, and the amazing experience of raiding with a team of friends are all things I don't want to leave behind. I think underpinning all the game's problems, though, is the studio's focus on scooping up as much Eververse store money as possible. Somewhere the path to what made the game fun in the first place has been severely strayed from. It's not understating it to say that the changes that need to happen in 2018 will make or break the game. I hope Bungie sees how seriously it needs to reconsider its current approach to making money from the playerbase. For the extended dance remix version of this discussion, here are my thoughts on Curse of Osiris.
Snow is falling. All around. Stealing cars and shooting guns. It's the season of snow in Los Santos. Merry Christmas, GTA Online.
Okay, so that's not quite as catchy as Shakin' Stevens' esteemed Christmas banger, but GTA Online is nevertheless feeling the spirit with snowfall, a new vehicle fit for fighting the elements, and a complimentary Albany Hermes Muscle Car.
Available to all players who sign into GTA Online this Monday, Christmas Day, the latter looks like this:
Moreover, the "sophisticated 4x4" Benefactor Streiter is now available at Southern San Andreas Super Autos, and should come in handy while braving the snow.
That looks like this:
Rockstar also notes a number of seasonal discounts running now through the festive period:
Properties
Arcadius Business Center—30% off
Fort Zancudo Hangar 3499—30% off
Luxury Vehicles
Yachts—30% off (All models)
Pegassi Zentorno—30% off
Assault Vehicles
Armored Karin Kuruma—30% off (both Buy It Now & Trade price)
Nagasaki Buzzard—30% off
HVY Insurgent—30% off (both Buy It Now & Trade price)
Premium Race and Time Trial Schedule:
Push the throttle to the max to earn big payouts in this week’s scheduled Premium Race and Time Trial events.
December 19th—25th
Premium Stunt Race—“H200” (Locked to Sports)
Time Trial—“Sawmill”
December 26th—January 1st
Premium Stunt Race—“Double Loop” (Locked to Super)
Time Trial—“Cypress Flats”
GTA Online's Festive Surprise event has grown in scope since its inception a few years back. The amount of effort that goes into transforming the map really is impressive, and the option to fight other players with snowballs in lieu of guns is a nice touch.
Here's a still of the snow as it appears today, courtesy of our Samuel:
Last night, we started playing the first act (of three) of GTA Online's new Doomsday Heist, with the intention of offering some thoughts on it before the holiday break. Unfortunately, we were hit by server trouble while on the final setup mission, so that'll have to wait until next year, when we'll write a more comprehensive piece about the whole thing. We did have a good time, though, and one particular mission was among the best that we'd played in any GTA. Below, we share some thoughts on what we experienced.
Samuel: Tom, I think it's fair to say our crew in GTA Online (which includes PCG's Phil Savage and contributor Tom Hatfield) is made up of semi-regular players. I've sampled mission types from all the expansions, for example, but it's only this year that I really started putting more hours into GTA. We've all completed the first five heists, though, and were excited about jumping into a new one. What did you make of the first few missions we ran?
Tom: It was the smoothest experience we’ve had with GTA Online so far. I mean, the servers went down at the end, but up to that point we managed to bash out a few missions in quick succession. Checkpointed missions, which didn’t just throw us all the way back to the start if we messed up. The game is so much more fun when you’re doing a lot of different short tasks that don’t make you drive all the way across the city multiple times.
It’s some of the most fun I’ve had heisting in GTA Online, and I can’t believe it’s a free update to be honest (though I guess you have to buy a facility with in-game money before you can launch the missions?). We infiltrated military bases, stole ambulances, had a shootout in a hospital, and pursued a massive jet while piloting a squadron of flying cars, all in a couple of hours.
Samuel: I thought the checkpointing was pretty good in the final heist of the original set, but there were definitely moments in those first four where I felt like I was being made to repeat a bit too much of the game. The checkpointing is great in these missions, though. I don't think I was frustrated by them at all. One thing I'm still not sure about is the decision to preface all the setup missions with a public server vehicle theft mission—the actual objectives are fun, but the idea of other players being able to spoil that is a bit annoying in a game that's already bad for griefing. I think Rockstar hopes mandatory public server missions will instill tension in what you're doing, but all it really does is reward griefers and frustrate people trying to have a good time. Luckily, we found ourselves on a server with just one other player and were left well alone, so we breezed through those bits.
And yes, it is a free update. You do have to buy a facility, which costs $1.25 million at a minimum—that's exactly one £12/$20 Shark card, but the truth is, this is a heist for advanced players, and anyone but a complete newbie will find that pretty reasonable. After the original heists, you've got $2 million in your account, for example, so you could've bought one no problem. GTA gets a lot of heat for its vehicle and property prices—which are sometimes bafflingly high—but you don't need to own much to have a good time in GTA, really, unless you're serious about collecting everything.
Out of the missions you list, Tom, the obvious breakout is the flying car mission. The steady escalation of that mission from ordinary GTA fare—follow vans, hack them, blow them up—to chasing an airplane through the sky in a flying DeLorean felt like something I'd never seen in GTA before. When the choppers turned up and you were dogfighting with them, it looked like something out of Star Wars. Meanwhile, I hacked the airplane, then took the thing down with rockets afterwards. It was thrilling, and hopefully points at the future direction for the series' campaigns. Much like some of the mission types in Smuggler's Run, it showed how much potential there is in more air-based GTA set pieces.
Tom: That mission embraced GTA’s sillier side, which I have always enjoyed. That mission turns the city into a huge playground, and the way it sends each of you after individual targets and then brings you back together for the finale is very satisfying—and all of it is a race against the clock. It reminded me of the madder co-op shenanigans I loved in the Saints Row series, but GTA 5 has far better driving and flying models, and the city is just spectacular when you’re dogfighting miles above.
Heist missions create loads of little action movie moments when you’re playing them with friends. At one point I was chasing a boat in DeLorean hovercraft mode when it turned into the sewers. I skidded after it only for a rocket to fly overhead and blow up my target. Turned out Phil had let off a homing missile that followed us both inside. In another mission we had to shoot our way out of a hospital while two of the team piloted a chopper to the rescue—the mad dash across the courtyard under police fire was peak GTA Online.
The Doomsday Heist makes me really excited about the potential for more quality multiplayer modes from Rockstar. If Red Dead 2 has a similar online component and comes to PC at some point, it could be the best thing ever. To me GTA Online feels like it’s built on slightly unstable foundations. Server outages and disconnections are pretty common, and it’s still sluggish when you’re trying to get a game going, but this was a free mode that came with the massive singleplayer campaign. It’s impressive that Online has grown into this since.
Samuel: Remember when we started spinning the hover cars around in the airport, Tom? It was like we found a way to make vehicles emote in GTA. It was amazing.
That escape from the hospital was so exciting, especially as you got left behind for some reason, which always happens to one guy in a heist movie. And these are just the setup missions! I'm sure players who have already beaten all three new heists are thinking, 'you wait, pal'. But even as setup missions, I'd say these are up there with the best stuff in the original heists, like stealing the Hydras from an aircraft carrier. Why do you have to go away for Christmas, Tom? Can't we just finish this damned thing?
And yes, GTA just needs to load faster, ban cheaters and deter griefing next time, then it'll be my perfect online game. Watching GTA grow has been fascinating, though—what's nice about Doomsday Heist is that it makes the missions the point again, rather than the money. Red Dead 2 has enormous potential. And the treasure hunt they added this week was another cool extra thrown into the game by Rockstar. I'd love more little mystery-based sidequests like that in future.
For an ageing game, then, this is a hell of a nice surprise, even if not all of the prior expansions have been winners. I can't wait to get stuck into more of The Doomsday Heist. Finally, Tom, do you want to explain what happened when I took you for a ride in the Vigilante, GTA's version of the Batmobile?
Tom: We thought we’d race to the objective ahead of Phil and Tom in their pathetic slow ordinary human car, but wow that Batmobile has one hell of a boost.
Samuel: $3.75 million of in-game cash and I fly it into the fucking sea. Embarrassing.
Update: And just like that, Rockstar has made it official. "Keep an eye on your iFruit for a special in-game email containing the first clue, then follow the trail to unlock the Double-Action Revolver in GTA Online," it wrote in a Newswire update.
"Once you acquire your gratis Double-Action Revolver, complete the Headshot Challenge in Freemode for a GTA$250,000 reward and unlock it for future gun-slinging exploits in Red Dead Redemption 2."
That also serves as your irregular reminder that no matter how badly we want it, Red Dead Redemption 2 has so far only been announced for consoles. It's currently expected to be out in the second quarter (April 1-June 30) of 2018.
Original story:
The sleuths at Team Guru have uncovered details for a GTA Online scavenger hunt that seems to tie into Rockstar’s next game: Red Dead Redemption 2. And it looks like this hunt will also answer the mystery of who is buried in that unmarked grave out in the middle of nowhere. Is it really the final resting place of John Marston?
Team Guru has made a name for itself by digging through GTA’s game files and solving long-running mysteries. The group was one of those responsible for solving the infamous UFO mystery earlier in the year, and in the code for the game’s latest update, Doomsday Heist, it found a new thread to unravel.
First off, mention of a “headshot challenge” was found in the files, telling players that, by completing the challenge, they’ll be able to unlock a special revolver in Red Dead Redemption 2. But there was more buried in the files—lots more. A chest, a note and a series of 20 locations were found, all relating to this hunt for a golden revolver.
The clues Guru Team discovered eventually lead to the aforementioned unmarked grave, which has been the source of speculation for years. There’s a good chance, then, that it’s been hiding a chest with a golden gun. The treasure belonged to a family that was torn apart by it, until one member hid it, presumably in the grave.
A $900,000 orbital cannon isn't the only thing that yesterday's Doomsday Heist update for GTA Online brought to the game, or even necessarily the most interesting. Also included is an all-new radio station, Blonded Los Santos 97.8 FM, hosted by Frank Ocean, Vegyn, Roof Access, and Fed.
Blonded Los Santos is the first new station to come to the game in more than two years—the last station, The Lab, debuted in July 2015. "Blonded features tracks like Rain by SWV, Crack Rock by Frank Ocean, Winnin by Chief Keef plus music from Todd Rundgren, Curtis Mayfield, Aphex Twin, JME, Jay Z, Migos, Marvin Gaye and many more," Rockstar said.
The name of the station, for the benefit of people (like me) who have no idea what "blonded" means, comes from Frank Ocean's real-life Blonded Radio show, which as Wikipedia explains ran from February to August 2017 on Beats 1.
A quick preview mix is embedded below, and if you'd like to take a listen without having to play the game, you can hit up Rockstar's "curator destination" (which has tunes from all the other GTA radio stations, too) at Apple Music.
GTA Online's Doomsday Heist is now live as part of the game's latest update. To begin the heist, you need to buy a new building called a facility from Maze Bank Foreclosures. The cheapest one will set you back $1.25 million of in-game cash, while the most expensive option costs $2.95 million. You can also install an optional orbital cannon, which costs $900,000.
Is that basic cost justifiable? If you go for a cheaper option and play GTA regularly, I think that sounds okay, although I'll have to play the heist first to make a proper call on that. According to IGN, Doomsday Heist features about 12 hours of new stuff, which is about as long as I played each GTA IV expansion back in the day. In real money terms, $1.25 million of in-game money costs £12/$20 in Shark Cards. I've bought the facility closest to my hangar at Zancudo, which is $1.67 million. To use it as a spawn point, though, I'll need to buy sleeping quarters on top of that, which is another $290,000. You need to be a CEO or MC President to start the heist.
The GTA Online subreddit has a really handy breakdown of the costs for new vehicles, facilities and more. As mentioned, you can have an orbital cannon added to your facility for $900,000, but according to the same thread, it costs $500,000 per manual shot or $750,000 per automatic shot (with a long cooldown), which I can't ever see myself spending. I can't verify those prices, though, because it requires more spare money than I have right now to buy one.
I've just downloaded the update, and visited my facility to begin the first setup mission, after watching the opening cutscene. There's a $65,000 upfront cost for that. As for the rest of the expansion, I'm unsure, but my aim is to play it across the next week and deliver some verdict on the quality of the new missions in Doomsday Heist.
I'm excited, though, and even just having a sudden drop of new missions, vehicles and so on is pretty cool, this deep into the game's lifecycle. As ever, there's a bunch of stuff I'll never spend money on, then a few items I find tempting. Let me know your thoughts on the pricing and new content below.
GTA Online gets a new heist on 12 December—The Doomsday Heist is described as an 'epic new online adventure' that sees your criminal crew contending with 'apocalyptic' threats. The trailer above suggests that it'll involve a whole host of the new vehicles Rockstar has added to the game over the last few years, including the military bunker vehicles and the aircraft from Smuggler's Run. There's also a bloody submarine and underwater cars.
Speculating on what the trailer shows us, it looks like it fits the same format as the existing four main heists—you can see four player characters being debriefed by Lester in the trailer, which feels very familiar. This is a real surprise. In 2015, Rockstar suggested that new heists weren't on the cards any time soon. Indeed, when the PC Gamer crew disbanded after the final heist, we thought we were done for good. Now I'm making them reinstall the game as you read this.
Here's Rockstar's description of the heist's premise: "A billionaire tech mogul, an idealistic intelligence agent, a socially awkward conspiracy theorist and a neurotic supercomputer have been forced into an unlikely alliance to save San Andreas from total annihilation. As apocalyptic threats mount from enemies unknown, you and your criminal crew are enlisted to un-tangle mysteries and eradicate threats spanning from the bustling streets of downtown Los Santos to the ocean floor and all the way to the inner depths of Mount Chiliad in an epic new online adventure.
I think this is fantastic news. Seasoned GTA players have sampled the game's existing heists over and over again at this point, and recent updates have focused more on businesses and multiplayer modes. I can't think of a better reason to come back to GTA than another one of these.
I love Grand Theft Auto 5's enduring performance culture, and have written about it on severaloccasions in the past. The game's stunt scene never fails to impress me, and the latest montage from the Evolve Stunting crew is wonderful.
Whereas you and I might drive, cycle or fly around GTA 5's Los Santos cityscape and see buildings, billboards and bridges—the game's most adventurous stuntmen and women see props for their latest productions.
Evolve is one of the most prolific crews out there, and the following video—named Overdue— portrays some jaw-dropping feats.
Sure, some of those set pieces take advantage of GTA 5's ridiculous physics mechanics, but I challenge any naysayers to replicate any of what's featured there. The amount of time, effort, and, crucially, failure that's required to master each stunt deserves credit, and the final outcome is a joy to behold.
Of the above, my favourites are Wiizo's stunt at around the 1.00 minute mark, and Robmom's at around 3.50. Share your own picks in the comments below.
Everyone's flown the Lazer jet in GTA V. It's the one you can steal from Fort Zancudo, in both singleplayer and GTA Online. In my experience, the fastest way to do it in story mode is to have a taxi driver take you there, nick the cab then speed through the barrier to the first available hangar, then hope you don't get shot down as you escape inside one. I've done this hundreds of times now. It's the best fun there is.
The Lazer is a decent enough if flimsy military aircraft, then. But I wouldn't pay 6.5 million GTA dollars for it. Today, though, if you log in to Warstock in GTA Online, you can. The price is a bit baffling—it's significantly more expensive than the similarly-powered Hydra at $3 million, and pricier than a lot of the other cool, customisable aircraft added as part of the Smuggler's Run expansion. More than that, though, if you own a hangar in Fort Zancudo, you can steal one at any time for free, and without being shot down by AA fire. So owning one doesn't really make any sense to me, unless you just need to have everything in GTA.
As highlighted by the GTA Online subreddit, the description for the Lazer on Warstock is amusingly meta. Not amusing enough to spend that much in-game cash, but hey. "Who doesn't remember their first time? It seems just like yesterday: stealing a delicate hypercar, hitting the freeway going north, taking the dirt ramp with enough speed to somersault 200ft over the rear fence of Fort Zancudo, dodging the small arms fire, stealing a P-996, getting a 120mm shell inserted firmly up your intake, and enjoying the ringside seat at the fireworks. But now you're older and wider, you're ready for a tactical fighter to call your own. Time to come of age."
To buy the Lazer with Shark Cards would cost a large fraction of the £65/$100 Megaladon card, which gives you GTA$8 million. I imagine this is one for completionists only.
